Behavioral Philosophy?

Edouard Machery, a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh by way of the Sorbonne, told subjects about a man named Joe who visits the local smoothie shop and asks for the largest drink available. Joe is informed that the megasmoothies come in a special commemorative cup. He doesn’t care one way or the other about the cup. He just wants the megasmoothie. Did he get the commemorative cup intentionally? Most people said no. What if, instead, he’s informed that the megasmoothie has gone up in price and that he’ll have to pay an extra dollar for it? Joe doesn’t care about the extra dollar; he just wants the megasmoothie. Did he pay the extra dollar intentionally? Most people said yes. Machery concluded that foreseen side effects of our actions are taken to be intended when we conceive them as costs incurred for a benefit.

Behavioral economics is bad enough. Do we need behavioral philosophy?

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That's because we need analytic philosophy in order to design new logical formalisms, and we need those logical formalisms in order to design policy languages for computer systems (e.g., for security purposes). Since those policy languages will be used by people who don't have PhD's in formal logic, it is important to understand the implicit logic people are reasoning with.

For example, you can view the Wason selection task either as evidence that people reason badly, or as evidence that the semantics of natural language conditionals are not actually classical propositional implication, but something else, like deontic rules. See Stenning and van Lambalgen's "A Little Logic Goes a Long Way: Basic Experiment on Semantic Theory in the Cognitive Science of Conditional Reasoning."

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